Ingres painted this icily erotic Turkish fantasy to discharge a debt. When it was exhibited in Paris in 1840, the painting revealed an aspect of his art rarely seen before. The odalisque, or concubine in a harem, allowed Ingres to reinterpret the ennobled, Renaissance tradition of the female nude in the modern context of the Middle Eastern “other.” The marquis de Custine wrote: “The execution is irreproachable, the conception poetic: yet the viewer remains unmoved before the form of a nude woman of Grecian beauty. . . . The painter has depicted his dream; he has painted neither that which he has seen, nor seen that which he thought. The painting is none the less his masterpiece and what is more, a masterpiece.” Two years later, Ingres traced the painting for a new version commissioned by the king of Bavaria, which features a landscape background painted mostly by Ingres’s student Paul Flandrin.

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Chikashi Kitazaki and Mina Oya, ed., Between Reality and Dreams: Nineteenth Century British and French Art from the Winthrop Collection of the Fogg Art Museum, exh. cat., National Museum of Western Art (Ueno, 2002), pp. 92-93, cat. #13, color repr.

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